Most homicides are mundane and on the way to clearance within a day or two. Milo sometimes calls me on “the interesting ones.”
This time, though, it was a matter of lunch.
Steak, salad, and scotch to be exact, at a place just west of Downtown. We’d both spent the morning at the D.A.’s office, he reviewing the file on a horrific multiple murder, I in the room next door, proofreading my witness statement on the same killings.
He’d tried to avoid the experience, taking vacation time then ignoring messages. But when Deputy D.A. John Nguyen phoned him at mid-night and threatened to come over with cartons of week-old vegan takeout, Milo had capitulated.
“Sensible decision and don’t even think of flaking on me,” said Nguyen. “Also ask Delaware if he wants to take care of his business at the same time, the drafts just came in.”
Milo picked me up at nine a.m., driving the Porsche 928 he shares with his partner, Rick Silverman. He wore an unhealthily shiny gray aloha shirt patterned with leering sea lions and clinically depressed angelfish, baggy, multi-pleated khakis, scuffed desert boots. The shirt did nothing to improve his indoor pallor, but he loved Hawaii so why not?
Solving the multiple had taken a lot out of him, chiefly because he’d nearly died in the process. I’d saved his life and that was something neither of us had ever imagined. Months had passed and we still hadn’t talked about it. I figured it was up to him to broach the topic and so far he hadn’t.
When we finished at the court building, he looked anything but celebratory. But he insisted on taking me out for a seventy-buck sirloin-T-bone combo and “all the Chivas you can tolerate, boy-o, seeing as I’m the designated wheelman.”
An hour later, all we’d done was eat and drink and make the kind of small talk that doesn’t work well between real friends.
I rejected dessert but he went for a three-scoop praline sundae drowned in hot fudge syrup and pineapple sauce. He’d lost a bit of weight since facing mortality, was carrying maybe two forty on his stilt-legged seventy-five inches, most of it around the middle. Watching him maximize the calories made it tempting to theorize about anxiety, denial, masked depression, guilt, choose your psychobabble. I’d known him long enough to know that sometimes gluttony was a balm, other times an expression of joy.
He’d finished two scoops when his phone signaled a text. Wiping his chin and brushing coarse black hair off his pockmarked forehead, he read.
“Well, well, well. It’s good I didn’t indulge in the firewater. Time to go.”
“New case?”
“Of sorts,” he said. “Bones buried in an old box under an older tree, from the size, a baby.”
“Of sorts?”
“Sounds like an old one so probably not much to do other than trace ownership of the property.” Tossing cash on the table, he got up. “Want me to drop you off?”
“Where’s the property?”
“Cheviot Hills.”
“No need to drive all the way to my place then circle back.”
“Up to you,” he said. “I probably won’t be that long.”
Back at the car, he tucked the aloha shirt into the khakis, retrieved a sad brown tweed sport coat from the trunk, ended up with a strange sartorial meld of Scottish Highlands and Oahu.
“A baby,” I said.
He said nothing.
CHAPTER 5
Seconds after Liz Wilkinson left with the bones, Moe Reed beeped in.
Milo muttered, “Two ships passing,” clicked his cell on conference.
Reed said, “Got all the deed holders, El Tee, should have a list for you by the time you get back. Anything else?”
“That’ll do it for now, Moses. Regards from your inamorata.”
“My what?”
“Your true love. She was just here.”
“Oh,” said Reed. “Yeah, of course, bones. She have anything to say?”
“Just that she thinks you’re dreamy.”
Reed laughed. “Let’s hope she holds that thought ’cause we’re going out tonight. Unless you need me to work late or something.”
“Not a chance,” said Milo. “This one won’t earn overtime for anyone.”
Reed was waiting outside Milo’s office, holding a sheaf of paper and sipping from a water bottle. His blond hair had grown out a couple of inches from the usual crew cut, his young face was pink and unlined, belying his old-soul approach to life. Massive muscles strained the sleeves of his blue blazer. His pants were creased, his shoes spit-shined. I’d never seen him dress any other way.
“Just got a call, El Tee, got to run. Blunt force trauma DB in a bar on Washington not far from Sony Studios.”
“Go detect.”
“Doesn’t sound like much detection,” said Reed. “Offender’s still at the scene, patrol found him standing on top of the bar yelling space demons made him do it. More like your department, Doc.”
“Not unless I’ve offended someone.”
He laughed, hurried off. Milo unlocked his door.
One of Milo’s lieutenant perks, negotiated years ago in a trade-off deal with a criminally vulnerable former chief of police, is his own space, separate from the big detective room. Another’s the ability to continue working cases, rather than push paper like most lieutenants do. The new chief could’ve abrogated the deal but he was smart enough to check out Milo’s solve stats and though he amuses himself with chronic abuse of “Mr. So-Called Hotshot” he doesn’t fix what isn’t broken.
The downside is a windowless work space the size of a closet. Milo is long-limbed and bulky and when he stretches he often touches plaster. When he’s in a certain mood the place has the feel of an old-fashioned zoo cage, one of those claustrophobic confinements utilized before people started thinking of animals as having souls.
He sank down into his desk chair, setting off a tirade of squeaks, read the list, passed it over.
Holly Ruche’s dream abode was a thirty-one-hundred-square-foot single-family residence situated in what was then the Monte Mar-Vista Tract, completed on January 5, 1927, and sold three months later to Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Thornton. After ten years, possession passed to the Thorntons’ daughter, Marjorie, who unloaded the property thirteen months later to Dr. and Mrs. Malcolm Crowell Larner.
The Larners lived there until 1943, when the deed was transferred to Dr. and Mrs. George J. Del Rios. The Del Rioses resided at the property until 1955, after which possession shifted to the Del Rios Family Trust. In 1961, ownership passed to the Robert and Alice Hannah Family Trust and in ’74 Alice Hannah, newly widowed, took sole possession, a status that had endured until sixty days ago when her heirs sold to Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Ruche.
Initial purchase price: forty-eight hundred dollars. Holly and Matt had gotten a recession bargain at nine hundred forty thousand dollars, with a down payment of a hundred seventy-five thousand and the remainder financed by a low-interest loan.
Milo jabbed the list twice. “
